1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a transport gear chain arrangement, in particular for the transport of glass articles and glass goods, with at least two gear chain sections, disposed in series in transport direction, wherein the gear chain sections in each case comprise two transport gear chains surrounding two sprocket wheels, which transport gear chains are led on a chain sliding path, wherein at least one sprocket wheel is driven in each gear chain section.
2. Brief Description of the Background of the Invention Including Prior Art
Such transport gear chains are employed in the glass industry as machine conveyor or feed conveyor, as annealing furnace crossover conveyor and annealing lehr cooling unit at the cold end of the testing stations. The transport of parts includes, for example, hollow glass bodies between a molding machine and an annealing furnace of a glass works or a glass factory. The articles to be transported are placed at the beginning of a transport path at uniform distance onto the transport gear chain such that no change of the set distance between the articles to be transported occurs until the goal point is reached under constant speed operation.
In contrast, it is an object in the hollow glass body transport to move the articles to be transported in front of an annealing lehr or cooling unit, having a smaller distance than the distance corresponding to the initially set distance of the articles. In other cases, it is desired that the distance of the articles to be transported is reduced or is increased again. Such a mode of operation requires a speed change of the conveyed articles occurring in certain sections of the transport path.
It has been proposed in the German printed patent document (DE-A-24 31 668) to employ a chain link with a varying length for application areas such as, for example, mechanical side walks. At the locations where the person steps onto the side walk, the speed of an endless chain is lower and subsequently the chain has to be accelerated again. A slowing down of the chain motion is utilized by way of connection rods made of one or more flexible connection members in the case of the known link chain with varying length. However, because of the extreme operating conditions in glass factories, no use should be made of such connection rods having flexible connection members